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A single line of code cost $8000

pietrasiak.com

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Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#351

Post by rvz »

gwbas1c wrote: post #175

In comparison, when I shipped a Mac desktop application: We used Sparkle, https://sparkle-project.org/ , to do our updates. IMO, it was a poor choice to "roll their own" updater. Our application was very complicated and shipped with Mono... And it was only about ~10MB. The Windows version of our application was ~2MB and included both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. WTF are they doing shipping a 250MB screen recorder? So,…

> The Windows version of our application was ~2MB and included both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. WTF are they doing shipping a 250MB screen recorder?

Electron.

> So, IMO, they didn't learn their lesson. The whole article makes them look foolish.

The lesson is to do better testing and write automated tests and don't roll your own updater.

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#353

Post by jayofdoom »

999900000999 wrote: post #173
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big clouds love these people too. So much of the software industry is just an outrageous combination of inexperience and "YOLO". Every problem can be solved by just giving AWS another $100,000 this month because we don't have time (and don't know how) to make even basically optimized software. So just burn the gas and electricity and give more money to the YAML merchants at Amazon.

That was the promise of "The Cloud". Data centers are big and scary, no body wanted to run their own. The hypothetical cost savings of firing half the IT department was too good to pass up. AWS even offered some credits to get started, first hit's free. Next thing you know your AWS spend is out if control. It just keeps growing and growing and growing. Instead of writing better software, which might slow down develop…

Doing 'the cloud' right at scale has to involve running your own cloud at some point. We should not pollute the good ideas around API-delivered infrastructure with the more questionable idea of outsourcing your infrastructuree.

OpenStack has been around 15 years powering this idea at scale for huge organizatons, including Wal-Mart, Verizon, Blizzard and more.

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#355

Post by coip »

Klaster_1 wrote: post #48
jarym wrote: post #7

Just amazed that ‘better testing’ isn’t one of the takeaways in the summary. Just amazed. Yea ‘write code carefully’ as if suggesting that’ll fix it is a rookie mistake. So so frustrating when developers treat user machines like their test bed!

How do you adjust your testing approach to catch cases like this? In my experience, timing related issues are hard to catch and can linger for years unnoticed.

not to ~dupe my top-level comment, but ETag headers can be used to manage this from a ~caching perspective

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#356

Post by coip »

999900000999 wrote: post #140

Sloppy coding all around. If you don't want to program something right, why don't you just direct users to the website to manually update it? On one hand it's good that the author owns up to it, and they worked with their users to provide remedies. But so many things aren't adding up. Why does your screen recorder need to check for updates every 5 minutes? Once a day is more than enough. This screams "We don't do QA,…

sad how many places take the position of "prod is QA and users are the best testers" lol

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#357

Post by bigiain »

nsingh2 wrote: post #281
tough wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tauri has been a thing for a while, it baffles me people still choose Electron without a good reason to do so. Also webapps are just great nowadays most OS support install PWA's fairly decently no? ffs

Tauri is not as platform-agnostic as Electron is because it uses different web views depending on the platform. I ran into a few SVG-related problems myself when trying it out for a bit. For example, on Linux, it uses WebKitGTK as the browser engine, which doesn't render the same way Chrome does (which is the web view used on Windows), so multi-platform support is not totally seamless. Using something like Servo as a…

> Tauri is not as platform-agnostic as Electron

I suspect the real reason electron got used here is that ChatGPT/Copilot/whatever has almost no Tauri example code in the training set, so for some developers it effectively doesn't exist.

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#358

Post by js2 »

benwilber0 wrote: post #151
mieko wrote: post #114

For people finding this thread via web search in the future: screen.studio is macOS screen recording software that checks for updates every five minutes. Somehow, that alone is NOT the bug described in this post. The /other/ bug described in this blog is: their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes. The software developers there consider all of this normal except the actual download, which c…

> their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes How on earth is a screen recording app 250 megabytes

Unpacked, it's actually 517M on disk:

   517M  ─┬ Screen Studio.app                     100%
   517M   └─┬ Contents                            100%
   284M     ├─┬ Resources                          55%
   150M     │ ├── app.asar                         29%
   133M     │ └─┬ app.asar.unpacked                26%
   117M     │   ├─┬ bin                            23%
    39M     │   │ ├── ffmpeg-darwin-arm64           8%
    26M     │   │ ├── deep-filter-arm64             5%
    11M     │   │ ├─┬ prod                          2%
  10.0M     │   │ │ └── polyrecorder-prod           2%
    11M     │   │ ├─┬ beta                          2%
  10.0M     │   │ │ └── polyrecorder-beta           2%
  10.0M     │   │ ├── hide-icons                    2%
   9.9M     │   │ ├─┬ discovery                     2%
   8.9M     │   │ │ └── polyrecorder                2%
   5.6M     │   │ └── macos-wallpaper               1%
    16M     │   └─┬ node_modules                    3%
    10M     │     ├─┬ hide-desktop-icons            2%
  10.0M     │     │ └─┬ scripts                     2%
  10.0M     │     │   └── HideIcons                 2%
   5.7M     │     └─┬ wallpaper                     1%
   5.7M     │       └─┬ source                      1%
   5.6M     │         └── macos-wallpaper           1%
   232M     └─┬ Frameworks                         45%
   231M       └─┬ Electron Framework.framework     45%
   231M         └─┬ Versions                       45%
   231M           └─┬ A                            45%
   147M             ├── Electron Framework         29%
    57M             ├─┬ Resources                  11%
  10.0M             │ ├── icudtl.dat                2%
   5.5M             │ └── resources.pak             1%
    24M             └─┬ Libraries                   5%
    15M               ├── libvk_swiftshader.dylib   3%
   6.8M               └── libGLESv2.dylib           1%

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#359

Post by esalman »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #227
benwilber0 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes How on earth is a screen recording app 250 megabytes

>> their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes > How on earth is a screen recording app 250 megabytes How on earth is a screen recording app on a OS where the API to record the screen is built directly into the OS 250 megabytes? It is extremely irresponsible to assume that your customers have infinite cheap bandwidth. In a previous life I worked with customers with remote sites (think mines…

> It is extremely irresponsible to assume that your customers have infinite cheap bandwidth

Judging by the price of monitor stands, I wouldn't be surprised for Apple to make such assumptions.

Re: A single line of code cost $8000

#360

Post by esalman »

mieko wrote: post #114

For people finding this thread via web search in the future: screen.studio is macOS screen recording software that checks for updates every five minutes. Somehow, that alone is NOT the bug described in this post. The /other/ bug described in this blog is: their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes. The software developers there consider all of this normal except the actual download, which c…

* 12 times per hour per user.
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